Determining the Impact of a Relational Aggression Prevention Program with Urban Aggressive Girls and Their Classmates

Introduction: Girls often harm others’ social standing by starting rumors about peers or by excluding others from activities, which is called relational aggression. Although relational aggression is not a new phenomenon, there have been relatively few interventions designed to address this, especially for urban girls. The Friend to Friend (F2F) relational aggression prevention program was designed through extensive participatory action research to ensure both its scientific merit and its relevance for urban ethnic minority relationally aggressive girls. We will present the results of a clinical trial of F2F: specific effects of the program on targeted relationally aggressive girls and on the broader impact that the program had on these girls’ classmates and teachers.

Method: A randomized parallel-group study design was conducted comparing the effectiveness of F2F to an attention control condition (called Homework Study Skills and Organization, HSO) among relationally aggressive girls from six urban low-income elementary schools. Analyses of Covariance were utilized for comparing post-test measurement between 144 relationally aggressive girls in the two conditions while adjusting for pre-test measurement. ANCOVAs were also performed to compare the broader impact of the program on non-participating girls and on boys.

Results: Results suggest that aggressive girls in F2F decreased their levels of relational aggression F(1, 125) = 4.46, p < .05, d = -.37, and increased their knowledge of social problem solving skills F(1, 124) = 18.66, p < .0001, d = .88, as compared to similar girls randomized to HSO, which was maintained at a one-year follow up. In addition, correlational analyses demonstrated that decreases in relational aggression from pre-test to post-test were positively associated with procedural, r = .27, p < .05, and process integrity, r = .39, p < .001, and with teacher engagement in the teaching content (r = .24, p < .05). Findings suggest that the indicated F2F program has broader effects such as increasing prosocial behaviors (friendships and niceness), decreasing relational and physical aggression, and improving teacher–student relationships among non-targeted boys. Further, F2F demonstrated effects for non-targeted girls including an increase in prosocial behaviors and improved teacher–student relationships.

Conclusion: Programs developed through extensive partnership-based approaches, such as the F2F Program, may have promise for addressing the needs of urban high-risk girls and their non-participating classmates and those classmates’ relationships with their teachers. Implications for examining the cost-effectiveness of indicated interventions such as F2F are discussed as are future research projects using the F2F program.